Tolstoy

After a pleasant week in Kazan, during which time Tolstoy’s head was turned by the demure and pretty Zinaida Molostvova, the brothers headed south. On 30 May, after a glorious week sailing down the Volga from Saratov to Astrakhan and a further week on horses, they finally arrived in Starogladkovskaya, in present-day Chechnya. That same evening Tolstoy got out his diary. ‘How did I end up here?’ he asked himself. ‘I don’t know. And why am I here? Also I don’t know.’⁴⁶ As it turned out, Starogladkovskaya was to be Tolstoy’s base for the next two and a half years, and the time he spent there was to be the making of him. By the time he left the Caucasus he would be a commissioned officer in the imperial army and a published writer. His firsthand experience of warfare in the Caucasus, furthermore, would prove to be invaluable when he later came to write the battle scenes in War and Peace.

It was Catherine the Great who had brought Russia into the Caucasus, when she graciously came to the aid of the struggling Orthodox Christians in the Kingdom of Georgia. In truth, she really wanted to keep Persia and the Ottoman Empire at bay, with the ulterior motive of moving closer to realising her ‘Greek Project’. She dreamed of defeating the Turks, and placing a Russian ruler on the throne of a newly restored Christian Constantinople. Her annus mirabilis was 1783, when she not only conquered the Crimea but signed the Treaty of Georgievsk, thus making Georgia a protectorate of Russia. Aggression by a newly resurgent Persia then played into Russia’s hands. In 1795, the last year of Catherine’s reign, Russia offered no assistance when the Persians invaded the capital of Tiflis, and Alexander I then violated the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1801 by simply annexing Georgia and abolishing its monarchy. Subsequent wars with the Ottoman Empire and Persia over the next decade resulted in the Russian Empire adding other small Caucasian nations to its territories.⁴⁷

A town quickly grew up around the fortress at the foothill of the mountains which had been established in 1784 to become Russia’s main military base in the area. It was optimistically named Vladikavkaz (‘Ruler of the Caucasus’), but it took more than building the Georgian Military Highway between Vladikavkaz and Tiflis for the Russians to conquer the Caucasus. Although the Georgians largely surrendered peacefully to the Great White Tsar, with many of their aristocracy later distinguishing themselves in the war with Napoleon, there were many north Caucasian peoples who strongly resisted the Russian presence, chief amongst them the Chechens and Avars in the mountainous east (close to the Caspian Sea), and the Circassians in the west (near to the Black Sea). Russia soon found itself fighting a protracted war against a tenacious resistance movement. General Alexey Ermolov, the first commander-in-chief appointed to run operations in the Caucasus, was notorious for his brutal methods, but the Chechens (whom he saw as primeval savages) often outwitted him, and he was replaced in 1827 by Ivan Paskevich. Other strategies were deployed by subsequent commanders-in-chief until the war finally came to an end in the east in 1859, and in the west in 1864.

Tolstoy’s experiences in the Caucasus were restricted to Chechnya in the eastern theatre of war, which had entered its last decade by the time he arrived in 1851. That was also the year in which Russia scored a minor victory. Since the 1830s, the disparate Muslim tribes of the northern Caucasus had been united by the Avar leader Imam Shamil who ruled the peoples of Chechnya and Daghestan. Shamil saw the war with Russia as a holy war, but he did not always enjoy full support from the highlanders. In 1851 he had fallen out with his commander Hadji Murat, a fellow Avar who went over to the Russian side. The following year, Hadji Murat tried to rejoin Shamil, but was murdered by Russian forces. Proof that Tolstoy’s involvement in the protracted struggle with the Caucasian highlanders made a deep impression on him is provided by the fact that he decided to turn this litany of betrayals into fiction at the very end of his life. Hadji Murat was written at a time when his priorities were more religious than literary, but it is one of his greatest works of fiction.